On Friday, Oct. 11, Dr. Sethuraman Panchanathan, director of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), delivered his speech “Innovation Anywhere, Opportunity Everywhere: Accelerating the Frontiers of Science and Technology” at Carnegie Mellon University as part of the President’s Lecture Series.
The President’s Lecture Series was launched by President Farnam Jahanian in 2023 as an endeavor to “engage and inspire the Carnegie Mellon community on issues of emerging and preeminent relevance to society.”
In his speech, Panchanathan discussed the work NSF does to support the advancement of science and stressed the importance of unleashing talent across the country. The NSF’s work has resulted in the funding of 268 Nobel Laureates.
However, Panchanathan said he believes more could be done to ensure equitable opportunities for everyone everywhere.
“We have left a lot of people behind. We continue to leave a lot of people behind,” Panchanathan said. “For far too long, domestic talent has been substituted by global talent in our country. This is not an acceptable future for any nation, particularly the United States.”
“Therefore, we need to make sure that we unleash every ounce of talent that is in the country, everywhere, across the broad socioeconomic demographic, across rural urban divides, across the rich diversity of the nation,” he continued.
To emphasize the revolutionary effect science and technology have on local communities, Panchanathan turned the audience’s attention to the city of Pittsburgh and the work being done at Carnegie Mellon.
He went on to mention the Pittsburgh based company Duolingo, whose founders Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker were both funded by the NSF while at Carnegie Mellon. Panchanathan also mentioned President Jahanian’s previous work at the NSF as he was “transforming the science directorate as the director of the computer and information science and engineering (CISE) directorate.”
Panchanathan said he believes the work done at Carnegie Mellon goes beyond what has been done for the NSF and what the NSF has done in partnership with Carnegie Mellon.
“The students, what they’re doing in soft robotics is really mind boggling,” Panchanathan said. “That’s the spirit. That’s what you do here. You infect the students with unbelievable creativity and advance them.” Furthermore, he said he appreciates Carnegie Mellon’s interdisciplinary nature.
The Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers Program (NSF IUCRC) has, Panchanathan said, been central in bringing universities and industries together to solve problems. It is through this partnership that an industry becomes inspired to “expand its operations, as well as potentially have new entrepreneurial ventures but more importantly advances discovery science,” he said.
Panchanathan explained the NSF’s role in the development of AI. “Just last year, we had 828 million dollars of investments by [the] NSF in AI-related programs,” he said. Panchanathan reminded the audience that AI was not an overnight achievement but rather the collective and persistent work of many over the past six to seven decades of “sustained investments by the NSF and a few other agencies.”
Panchanathan said that one of the greatest advantages of the NSF is that while some investors may retreat from a project when progress seemingly comes to a halt, the NSF’s belief that a project will succeed causes them to hyper-invest and in doing so, allow these projects to realize their potential.
As Panchanathan had stressed earlier, he wants to focus on the talent being left behind in the advancement of science and one way he believes this can be solved is through partnerships.
“We need to hyper-partner, bring every possible partnership, interagency partnership, industry partnership, philosophy partnership, on the agent, international partnership, state cities partnership, and see how we can rapidly scale to what we need to be doing as a nation,” he said.
Since computational and data resources are being left to a handful of corporations and institutions, it is not possible for everyone who has AI-related ideas to be funded. It was through partnerships with 12 federal agencies and 26 private partners that the NSF was able to help launch the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR), which as of today funds 117 AI-related projects in the country.
The research ecosystem at various institutions has been allowed to grow because of the effort to support and bring talent into those institutions.
“That’s not something that is available for a faculty member in Wichita State, or in Howard University or in a community college in Maricopa,” Panchanathan said. “How are they ever going to be able to take their ideas if talent and ideas are democratized and opportunities are not democratized? We have to do something about it.”
“It’s not about lowering any standards, that’s insulting. What it is about is how we take these ideas and lift them up to transit the gold standard merit review,” he continued.
Panchanathan said the NSF must break down systemic barriers when it comes to who received federal funding for STEM research, which is the central idea behind the NSF’s Growing Research Access for Nationally Transformative Equity and Diversity (GRANTED).
Panchanathan said that one cannot conscientiously compare a B-grade student in high school who worked three jobs to support their family and possibly came from a single parent household to an A-grade student who had everything that they could do.
“Yes, you’re smart, but please don’t think there are not people smart like you or smarter than you; they didn’t have the opportunities,” Panchanathan said. He encouraged the audience to “take a pledge that you are going to, in your lifetime, take responsibility for 25 individuals that you would personally mentor, open doors to, and give them the opportunity to realize their full potential and talent.”
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